When MMORPGs first came out, games like Everquest (EQ) and Ultima Onilne were played in mostly static worlds, where everything was accessible simultaneously to all players on the server (also called, “Shard”). If you entered the “Mines of Moria” dungeon, and I came along 5 minutes later, I would be able to enter it, meet you, and perhaps interact with you inside the dungeon. This is, of course, the most “realistic” way to present the world of an MMORPG. However, it has a few drawbacks. The main one is that it enables people who want to annoy or otherwise ruin the game play of others (called “griefing” in the industry), to do so pretty much at will. Two typical griefing methods were (and still are) “training” — where you get a bunch of monsters angry at you, have them follow you as if you’re the engine and they are the train cars, and pull them into the area of other, usually lower level, characters, resulting in massive carnage — and “kill stealing” — where you grab a monster I am working on fighting, in an effort to steal the experience points from me and take them for yourself.

Additionally, many quests asked you to kill some “boss” monster (the ruler or boss of the dungeon, as it were), who might be on a 24 hour (or longer) “re-spawn” timer — meaning that when he is killed by player group A, he will not reappear (re-spawn) for that period of time, making him unavailable to all other player groups trying to do this quest. This led to “spawn camping,” where people would find the place where the boss usually appears (his “spawn point”) and sit there and hang out for hours at a time waiting for him to reappear (”camping his spawn point”).

Because both the “training” and “killstealing” (KSing) forms of griefing were annoying, and because spawn camping was horrifyingly boring to most players, and because there was no good way to police this in an “open world” game such as EQ, designers began to try coming up with new ways to give players an experience that allowed them to avoid trains, KSers, and spawn camping. One of the better ideas was the “instance.” An “instance” is a private or semi-private copy of some chunk of the game world. For example, in City of Heroes, your contacts will assign a mission to you. This mission will lead you to a random door somewhere in the city. When you click on that door, you see a “loading screen” and your character is moved to a “mission instance.” Only you, and any other people on your team, can get to this instance using that door, and inside it, you can have a “private” adventure. City of Heroes also introduced the concept of “instance scaling” — they scaled the level of the instance to the level of the players, and the number of enemies per spawn point to the number of players on the team. So if I have the mission to fight Dr. Vahzilok, and I am alone at level 18, I will fight 3 level 18 “Vahzilok” minions at a time in the mission instance, and fight a level 18 version of Dr. V that is scaled to a single player (an “Elite Boss” version of him). If I go in at level 20 with 5 companions, I will fight probably about 9 level 20 “Vahzilok” minions at a time, and when I get to Dr. V, he will be level 20 or 21, and he will be an “arch-villain” (AV) , which is much tougher than an Elite Boss.

The enormous advantage of instancing missions or quests or dungeons like this should be readily apparent. In the first place, the mission is almost always the “right” strength for you, making it generally a decent but not insurmountable challenge. This is not true with “open world” dungeons, because they are fixed, designed for a specific level and group size. If you go in at the wrong level or with the wrong number of players they will be too hard or too easy. This means that in City of Heroes, your content is always “scaled” about right, which is not true in other games. Additionally, since the instances are private, there is no chance any other players will come along and “KS” you, or “train” enemies onto you, and there is absolutely no need to “camp” spawns. If there’s a boss you have to defeat, he will be there in your instance, just for you.

Now, at first it seems like instancing is all pros and no cons. And indeed, I thought so at first, but there are some costs. One of the main ones is that it makes the world seem a lot less populated. In City of Heroes, players can spend 90% or more of their time inside mission instances — and players inside mission instances are not in the “open world” part of the game. This makes the game seem like a ghost town even when the servers are densely populated. Guild Wars took this a step further, with cities being the only “open” section, and the whole world being an instance. So one of the main drawbacks of instancing whole quests, dungeons, or even zones, is to make the world seem nearly empty.

I still think instancing is a great idea. But I think that Guild Wars definitely goes too far with it, and even City of Heroes might use it a little too much. I like being able to avoid the griefers, but if the world seems to empty, that isn’t what I am looking for in an MMORPG either. Somehow, designers need to strike some sort of a balance between keeping players safe from the jerks, avoiding spawn camping, and yet providing enough “open world” content that the world seems large, populated, and alive.

It may be that improving computer power will help us solve this problem. The reason a lot of worlds with heavy instancing seem empty is because each individual server can only hold a certain number of people. As a result, the population is spread all over the place. As server power increases, however, more and more players should be able to play on the same server, and this just might enable us to have enough players in the world that, even with instances, it seems crowded and alive, rather than empty. We will have to wait and see what happens.

In the mean time, I think I still prefer the COH system. Having my own private copy of every quest, that I can do either alone or with my friends, is perfect for me. It allows me to do all the content without having to worry about “what level you have to be” to do a given mission… because you are always the “right” level, since missions are scaled to you. And it lets me avoid the griefers and just have fun in the game as it was meant to be played. So, until something better comes along, I’m going to keep preferring the private instances scaled to the level of my character and size of my party.

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